


It Laps Like It Wants to Swallow You Whole

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: The World Anew (Also Indulging Pale Urges) [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Self-Harm, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, mentions of gore, multiple uses of the nickname chucklefuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On post-sgrub Alternia, no one is having problems quite like Gamzee Makara.  Coming back to find that you are relatively sane after you killed four of your friends isn't really the fiesta it's made out to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Laps Like It Wants to Swallow You Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Set parallel to When It Fails--while that one is mostly Erisol, this one is mostly GamKan, because both are indulgent pale pairings that I love to pieces. Also both are independent pieces, so no worries about reading one or the other!

You are standing in the rags of your codtier outfit, your entire body nothing more than a mess of ragged flesh, and you aren’t sure how you’re still upright.  It has taken all of your strength and what little fortitude you had in you to withstand the righteous blasts shooting forth from the mouth of your former god, and you guess somehow that it’s probably a good thing that you can’t keep down a clown.  Despite the fact that you’ve wanted nothing more than to lose consciousness for so long now, you know that it is your doings that give the rest of your friends the last chance at survival they will ever have.  You would feel powerful, that their lives rest in your hands, if not for the apathy beginning to swirl in colors behind your eyes.  You are tired.  You have been tired.  You were tired when you were vomiting up your own grape jelly blood to present Lord English with the keys, you were tired when you sat docile under Aranea motherfucking Serket’s wrongly benevolent gaze, you were tired when the rage swept you up higher than you have ever been before and demanded that you kill EVERYONE for they were all BENEATH YOU, BROTHER.  The only thing that kept you going through it all was the fact that you had an ultimate purpose, and the fact that no one, no thing, no nothing ever conceived in this universe or the next could PUT YOU THE MOTHERFUCK DOWN.

And now, as you sway on your own two feet, your purpose is being completed.  You watch with a tired, giddy sort of glee as Calliope, glorious in her resurrection, lays her brother down flat with a roar of triumph, and the bloodied kids around you roar alongside her, and when you blink you open your eyes to a gentile boom that rattles the very planes of paradox space and you see words begin flashing across the very expanse of the cracked, half-destroyed sky around you--GAME OVER, GAME OVER, GAME OVER.  Your friends, your former friends, the last of your species, are all cheering.  You don’t think to join them.  Instead, you sink down into oblivion as somewhere inside of you your body begins to unravel, bits and pieces sloughing off your skeleton until you are nothing but dull, bulky fangs grinning into the abyss.  Then you are nothing at all, and you are pleased as you finally rest.

Until you wake with a start, hauling your head out of a recuperacoon and choking on slime, your entire body curling and twisting as you try to get air.

The first horrible, tantalizing thought is that duh, you were DREAMING all along.  What a great joke, you probably forgot to eat your pie before you rolled off to sleep you PANROTTED FUCKING MORON, and now you’re paying with DAYMARES AND HEADACHES.  You even have the gall to feel relieved that the game wasn’t real, before you sprawl across your dirty floor and realize that you are blind stinking sober, the kind of sober that could only catch hold after a few perigees or more between pies.  You paw at the floorboards, hacking the last of the slime up out of your filthy lungs.  You hear it splatter.  There is nothing else for a long moment, until your eyes roll open to find thick black hair plastered over your face.  You try to catch onto a proper breathing rhythm where the air doesn’t feel sticky in your chest.  Then you shakily push yourself up, rolling back until you are sort of balancing on your knees and the balls of your feet, and you look around.

Your hive is exactly how you remember it from before you entered the game.  It’s the sort of slovenly messy that always made you feel right at home, like maybe you weren’t a little fucking squirt left all alone in a hive made for giants.  Your husktop is sitting abandoned off to one side, the screen playing a repetitive little dance of colors to indicate that it’s sleeping.  Horns are lying willy-nilly all over the floor around it.  They’re everywhere, you think you might even be sitting on one, and you almost have a real fucking laugh over that.  What gave them the right to be lounging all over the place like they own it?  Why aren’t they up in a little PILE like they SHOULD BE?

That is the moment that you break.

Without the drive of the game and the various people that took over your thinkpan during it, you are suddenly free to really stop and think about what happened.  And as you contort into a ball on your floor, you realize that it isn’t really about what happened as much as it’s about WHAT YOU DID when you let them all TAKE YOU OVER.

YOU let IT you LET it YOU let IT you LET it HOW could YOU let IT take OVER?

A tendril of rage curls up over your teeth and you let out a howl, so loud that it rattles your bones despite the fact that you’re little again, you’re hardly six and a half sweeps, your life has been rewound but you STILL KNOW you still remember that YOU LOST IT IN THE MOST SPECTACULAR WAY A TROLL EVER COULD.  And it’s about to happen again.

Your chest is heaving, you’re pretty sure your eyes are flaring the color of the alternian sun, and you know you don’t have long before you completely lose yourself, so you do the most logical thing you can get your thinkpan to act on--you sink your teeth into the nearest patch of your own flesh, and when the pain cuts through the rage a little bit, you give it a good tug.  Skin rends under your rounded fangs, spitting indigo back at you, and when you can think again you slowly unlatch your jaws from your knee and raise your eyes.  It is with hardly an inflection that your mind is made up.

You have to get out.  You are a demon, and you’ve killed those who mean most to you, and if you don’t MOVE then they are all doomed to a fate worse than all the motherfucking dying they’ve already done.

On a spurt of adrenaline you spasm until your body is somewhere in the vicinity of your husktop--you snap it closed and grab it, not even wasting the time to shove it into your modus.  You then whip yourself onto your feet, feeling slime under your claws, shivering as the bite on your leg pulls in a silvery slice of pain.  You get a whole two steps before you slip and tumble, but that doesn’t matter.  You shove the edge of the husktop into your mouth and begin clawing at the floor for traction, yanking yourself along on all fours.  The front door is open--you’re a moron, you can’t remember once remembering to close it--and you nearly crash face-first into the dewy sand outside.  Unlucky for you, the sun isn’t out.  It’s cradled under a blanket of thick, oily clouds, about to set.  You howl around the casing of your husktop.  It would be so much EASIER to do this if all you had to do was prostrate yourself on your lawnring, but that’s not happening.  So you do the next best thing--you scramble to the edge of the ocean, where fetid water laps up to you like it wants to swallow you whole, and get back on your feet.  Goatdad’s nowhere to be seen, of COURSE HE’S FUCKING NOT, why did you even let that little bit of hope get inside you?  You shiver and curse, and with the highblood rage you always used to push down with all the slime you take your husktop and hurl it as hard as you can into the waves.  It goes under without a complaint, sinking into the water.

Halfway done, panting with the barely contained rage, you set out to finish what you started.  All it takes is a few steps and the current begins tugging at your feet, the water splashing up and striking your flesh with a cold even colder than your blood.  It would make you melancholy for the old goat if your stomach wasn’t seizing up with fear and guilt and anger.

You keep going.  Something inside of you tries to tell you to stop, to go back, but you think of Tavros--his poor, decapitated head staring at you, eyes frozen in fear as you pushed your lips against his--and you nearly double over.  You, friend, are a monster.  You know it just as you know your own natty hair.  Thought you were a god?  Thought you were two?  Ha, what a motherfucking LAUGHRIOT THAT WAS.

When the waves are just bumps of water rolling about your neck, you begin to lose contact with the ground.  You kind of sort of learned to swim when you were young, when you spent days upon days out here looking for the old goat, but you aren’t trying to swim now.  You’ve drowned your only connection to the people you’ve hurt most, but that isn’t going to finish the job, no, you have to put yourself out of your misery too.  You have to put yourself down like a barkbeast, like everyone and their ancestor failed to do in the game.  A few more yards and you can’t find the ocean floor.  The sun is peeking out just a little, but it’s so close to set that you can hardly feel it.  You imagine that it’s a gentle hand, guiding you down to your place among the dead.  So many dead… olive and cobalt and teal and cerulean…  You go under imagining their disembodied heads smiling at you.

Water pushes and breaks above your head, and you can see the last of the streaky sunset even through the water.  As you push with your arms to keep yourself under the waves, you begin to realize just how hard it must be to kill an indigo.  You hold your breath for two minutes, three, waiting for unconsciousness to grab you but it DOESN’T COME and you don’t know if your thinkpan is going to overcome your willpower before you can GET THE JOB DONE but you really hope it doesn’t.  THAT would be a FUCKING WASTE.  Four minutes, five, six, and you begin to get angry at your own body because what kind of MOTHERFUCKER WHAT DOESN’T OWN GILLS wouldn’t be DEAD YET?  What is WRONG WITH YOU?  WHY can’t you just DIE PROPER?

Seven, eight, and you begin wondering what would happen if you just breathed in the water.  Would you lose consciousness faster or slower with your aeration sponges MOTHERFUCKING WATERLOGGED?  You don’t know if you’ll have a choice for much longer--the muscles are hitching, and you think you’re going to breathe in involuntarily very soon.  So you make the decision for them.

Filling up your lungs with water was definitely a good idea, you think, as cool liquid flows in and stops your ceaseless burn for air.  You can almost convince yourself that you’re back on dry land, except for the fact that it’s thicker, and getting harder and harder to push through your open mouth, and whoa, yeah, you think the tether is finally letting up because your thoughts are getting a little lost trying to get through your thinkpan and you smile at that all pleased except what is that moving holy hell whatever it is is HUGE and you are right smack in its way--

You barely catch the roar that shakes the seabed before a thick, white tail is whipping through the water in a trail of bubbles.  You are flung like a doll, and you barely have time to swipe your claws at the rising moons before you are being dragged back down towards the surface of the ocean, head thick and body heavy with water, an unearthly screech rattling the airwaves cushioning your body as you fall.  You feel your shirt rip as something clamps onto the back of it, bringing you to a startling halt some five feet above the waves.  You stay limp, your head lolling.  If you tried you think you could breathe in a delicious breath, just a simple pull of the airy lightness blowing along your soaked skin, but even that seems so hard.  Best to just leave things be.  Your diaphragm is like a wet blanket in your chest, too heavy to bother moving.  Your neck is going to snap under the pressure of your head hanging down like that, your soaked hair like a gold weight.  You don’t mind it much at all when you finally--finally!--begin to lose connections to all your muscles and tendons, your body going numb from your limbs inward.

The giant maw gripping your shirt lets out another angry noise.  You vaguely think _Oh, shit, the goat is mad this time_ before you are being shaken violently from side to side.  Something lodges in your chest cavity and you begin coughing, your lungs deciding that they’d like to work after all.  Deep, vicious shudders roll through you from the gut up, and you’re too busy vomiting up brackish water to notice when you’re set down on the wet sand.  You huddle into yourself, your chilled body shivering.  You hurt.  Messiah’s mercy, do you hurt.  You think you might even be hurting a little more than when you first put yourself into the damn water.  Your head spins and you wonder if maybe you’re actually dying, before a large fin gives you a good smack to the face.

The goat nestles around you, nuzzling your side when your breathing slows, and you have to fight the fire burning along your insides a little to keep up steady breathing.  You haven’t a clue where he’s been--when he was a sprite, the only thing he’d tell you was that he left because he had ‘things to attend to’, whatever that ever meant, and you want to bat him away when he begins licking at your still bleeding knee, but you can’t quite because he’s actually there.

Why does it still feel so nice to have him close, even after all the time he spent away?

You fall into an uneasy sort of sleep as the moons rise higher and higher, crossing one another on their paths across the sky, and you wake up some time later.  It’s with a frightening suddenness that you return to consciousness, alone again, your head just beginning to thud from the pull of the daymares that terrorize you.  You roll over and find that you are a wretched excuse for a troll, aching all over.  You have sand everywhere you care to look, and your hair is knotted with salt.  You try to sit up a little bit, sniffing hard, only to find that someone is splashing toward you.  They sound way excited.  Have they been yelling this whole time?

“Gamzee!  Hey, I found your husktop!  You’re lucky it’s still working.”  She’s smiling, and you want hysterically to growl until she leaves you be, but she’s already sat down beside you, holding out the partially waterlogged computer so that you’ll take it.  You don’t.  You do manage to bare a few teeth, but she just responds in kind and you remember that seadwellers are fucking terrifying when you think about it, all rows and rows of serrated fangs that close like traps.  Her smile is a fucking shark.  You curl up a little further, miserable, and her expression dips just a little as she looks at you.  “Oh, wow, did you try to go in after it?” she asks.

You cough, throat scratchy with salt.  “Something like that.”  You don’t get out another word, staring at her.  God, does she even know what you did back on the meteor?  You aren’t sure.  You never spoke to her in the bubbles, and she didn’t ever seem one iota interested in you.  She’s a whole different world, one of the brightest pinks and greens like the moons themselves, so you just sit up and do your level best to keep yourself all contained and in one piece and not contaminating her.  You can figure out what to do about yourself once she’s gone, and her unnatural brightness with her.

She sighs after a long moment, thrusting the husktop on the sand between you.  “Karkat’s been messaging everyone, trying to make sure that we all got back.  That last battle was all over the place!  I’m on my way to visit Nepeta, but he asked if I’d stop in on you.  Which it looks like was a good thing, because who else could have rescued your computer for you?”  She beams at you with all of her needle-sharp fangs, and you feel like crying.  Why is she being nice?  What’s wrong with her?

What’s wrong with you?

You’re digging your claws into your sides when she leans over and pries open the husktop, tsking at the tooth-marks you left on the casing.  You don’t pay any mind until she lets out a squeal and you hear a Ping!, meaning Trollian is open and you’ve got messages.  In an instant you snatch it up, curling your thin, lanky body around it so she can’t see, but the damage is already done.

“They might not really seem like it, what with all their blustering and shouting, but everyone would be very relieved to know you’re alive,” she says, and her head tilts up like the weight of the circlet of gold on her crown is nothing at all.  She reassures you with the decisive affirmation of royalty, but all the same you know she’s wrong.  You don’t think to mention that they’d also probably be relieved to know you’re dead, that they’re probably only waiting to hear from you so they know you’re staying out of trouble.  Your neck and your back and your stomach and your head and every part of you are pounding, aching, and you have to keep swallowing as you hesitantly poke at the trackpad with one claw, clicking on the first blinking name like it’ll hurt you even more if you don’t do it soft enough.  It’s Karkat, your best friend, and you feel rather than hear a sniffle come out of you.  You hunch over so far that you think your horns are going to hit your knees soon, unable to look at the text on the screen, because if he hates you completely you don’t think you can hold it together in front of her.

Somehow, she seems to get the hint.  “Right, okay!  That problem’s solved now, so I’ll leave you on your own.  Don’t hesitate to message me later on!  I’ll be under water until I reach Nepeta’s, but I still get a pretty good signal!”  She stands up, and she seems so tall and so strong even at six sweeps that you just feel like some sort of insect crawling around at her feet.  You only nod as she pads back into the water, her skirt flowing around her.  You think she’ll leave it at that, but she looks back when the waves are splashing about her midriff.  “Hey Gamzee!  You might want to change your modus if you keep having trouble with it!” she says brightly, and then she dips back below the waves and is simply gone.

You sit and watch for a long time to see if she’ll bob back up, but she doesn’t and after a while your husktop beeps to tell you it’s going to run out of battery soon.  You curl back over, hugging it against your hips so you can rest your forehead on the top of the open lid.  You can hardly see anything from this angle, but you don’t think that matters, really.

You swallow hard.

\--carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]\--

CG: HEY FUCKWAD.

CG: CHUCKLEFUCK.

CG: OOZING BALL OF PUS MADE OF ALL MY WORST MEMORIES COAGULATED INTO ONE STINKING EXCUSE FOR A SENTIENT BEING.

CG: FUCKING HELL GAMZEE, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO IGNORE ME.

CG: JUST FUCKING ANSWER BEFORE I BLOW SOMETHING INSTRUMENTAL TO MY OWN SURVIVAL, LIKE MAYBE THE BRAIN CELLS CONTROLLING CONSCIOUS SPEECH.

CG: OR, BETTER YET, JUST LET ME FUCKING BLOW SOMETHING OUT.

CG: IT WOULD BE BETTER THAN THE MESS I’M IN RIGHT NOW.

CG: I’M NOT GOING TO WAIT HERE FOREVER, GAMZEE.

CG: FUCKING PICK UP YOUR GRUBFUCKING HUSKTOP, PUT YOUR DAMN CLAWS ON THE KEYS, AND GIVE ME SOME KIND OF AFFIRMATION THAT YOU HAVEN’T EXPLODED INTO A PUDDLE OF INDIGO SLIME.

CG: IT WOULD SERVE YOU RIGHT FOR ALL THAT FUCKING TIME THAT YOU SPENT SHIRKING DEATH, BUT I DIGRESS.

CG: OKAY, YOU KNOW WHAT, CHUCKLEFUCK?

CG: JUST FUCKING PING ME WHEN YOU’RE CONSCIOUS, I’LL GET TO YOU WHEN YOU DEIGN TO RESPOND TO MY SUMMONS.

TC: I'M HeRe

TC: JuSt hAd sOmE TrOuBlE WiTh mY MoDuS.

TC: I Uh

TC: MaYbE LoSt mY HuSkToP In tHe oCeAn fOr a bIt.

TC: BuT It’s aLl gOoD, mY FiShSiS AlL FiShEd iT RiGhT OuT FoR Me.

TC: so…

TC: WE’RE ALL GOOD HERE.

TC: i…

TC: UH

TC: …

TC: honk?

You sit for a while, trying to massage the prickles of cold out of your fingers and toes.  He’s online, but he’s not messaging you back, and more than ever you remember everything you’ve done wrong.  You bite clear through one lip before you can make your brain work right.

TC: …

TC: karkat?

CG: GOT THE MESSAGE.  

CG: NOW SIT THE FUCK DOWN, I HAVE MORE PRESSING ISSUES RIGHT NOW THAN DETERMINING YOUR SANITY.

CG: NAMELY THAT PEOPLE ARE STILL MISSING.

CG: WHICH YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOW ON A NEED-TO-KNOW ONLY STATUS AS OF RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

CG: WHICH MEANS THAT YOU, AND ANY FUCKING MURDER-MESSIAH PERSONALITIES OF YOURS, NEED TO GET THE FUCK INTO YOUR RECUPERACOON AND FUCKING CHILL UNTIL I GET EVERYTHING ELSE SORTED OUT.

CG: I SWEAR TO THE NEAREST ELDRITCH TERROR IF I, OR ANYONE ELSE, CATCH YOU OUT STROLLING AT ANY POINT BEFORE I SAY THAT YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR HIVE, YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE HELL TO PAY.

CG: UNDERSTAND ME RIGHT THE FUCK NOW: I AM NOT DEALING WITH YOU YET, SO YOU HAD BETTER KEEP YOUR FUCKING PAWS OFF OF EVERYONE ELSE.

CG: NOW GIVE ME ANY INDICATION THAT YOU UNDERSTAND ME.

TC: yes sir.

TC: I GOT MY STUPID SELF ALL OVER ON THE

TC: motherfucking gist of it.

CG: FUCKING GREAT.  NOW STOP WITH THE MURDERQUIRK, I DON’T HAVE THE MENTAL CAPACITY TO DEAL WITH IT RIGHT NOW.

\--carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]\--

And that’s it.  A little notification pops up, telling you that he blocked you, your best friend, all up and gone, his tag disappearing from your tagroll.  You swallow down a lump of what you think must be a chunk of seasalt or something, because you swear you feel it scratching at you from the inside and making tears well up in your eyes.  You close the husktop and spend a few minutes looking out at the sea.  You think about what you tried (got so close) to do, and you wonder if maybe Goatdad would be there again if you went out for a second attempt.  You think he wouldn’t.  That makes your chest hurt even worse than it was before, and you think that maybe you should just listen to Karkat for once in your fucking life.

Inside you let your husktop tumble to the floor, not even plugging it in, and you sink back under the slime.

 


End file.
